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Phat Cat’s has been closed for public last weekend for around two days. The reason why? Because the wanted to rebuild it from scratch. Not a bad idea at all if you’re unhappy with your sim or want to improve it. Given the fact, that there’s always traffic at any time there also the only way to do it if you want to be able to work quickly and undisturbed at all.

So, now since it’s open again for around one week, what to say about the rebuild Phat Cat’s? The good part is: it is for sure a visual improvement compared to the old spot, all the good things are still there, meaning dance floor, classy ambiente, also the big mall.

The bad thing about it? Well, Phat Cat’s is now way too heavy graphics wise. Meaning: there’s way too much on heavy graphics in it, it was always laggy of course, since it’s almost always full, but the new arrangement of prims and stuff adds way much to an even more worse lag now, too.

If you’re running a somewhat bigger group (> 1000 members or so) be careful if you want to use group chat. It’s still broken, meaning quite often message B shows up before your message A does. If you are able to use it at all, that is.

And - you still cannot disable chat for all except some moderators, so a group always tends to get “spammy” from time to time. Many people now have a very short fuse if reading messages from a group chat, too. Most times it’s just a waste of time, anyway.

Like Jenny saying “hi”, Mike saying “hello”, Jenny asking “wanna dance” and so on and on…

This is a feature that’s been missing since ever: the ability to backup the content of a whole sim externally.

For example, if you are a builder and building a whole sim from scratch (or with other stuff) and a forced to put the sim down, since you don’t have the money anymore to sustain it - or your customer, whatever - taking down the sim means taking down all the labour cost, all the work. If you want to put the work up later, again, you’ve got to start more or less from scratch.

In this case it would be very nice to have the ability to backup a whole sim and store it somewhere for possible future use. At the moment this isn’t possible, to this is a big, missing feature in the portfolio of Second Life.

If you take a look at the recent ban of gambling, you may wonder what’s coming up next to be banned or limited. If Lindenlab would be consistent with their intentions, one things really pops up mighty in my mind: prostitution.

Sex and, yes, prostitution, though most people prefer to call themself in an euphemistic kind of way escort and not prostitute, is one of the big driving motions behind Second Life at all. And, yes, like gambling it’s prohibited in many countries Second Life is available.

So if Lindenlab is really consistent about establishing a somewhat “cleaner” Second Life this must be next on their agenda: the containment or even shutting down of most prostitution happening in Second Life.

Either that, or as another consequence building up a new strictly, clean, separate corporation grid without this kind of business at all, like the Teen Grid is today. But then again, this would hurt their land sales, since it would depend on how many residents of course would like to visit this clean grid and you got more possible visitors on the main grid than on an own corporation grid. But for strict in house usage such a grid would be a heavy, good asset for Lindenlab to have.

When you take a look at the recent development of Second Life, then there are some things different compared to earlier developments:

• There are still no key metrics available for August 2007. Those tend to get published later and later over the months.

• The exchange of Linden dollars has reached a peak in the 1st quarter of 2007; since then it has been slowly decreasing, so Q1 is its peak (take a look at the last graph here).

• Premium residents have reached their peak in June, there have already been less again in July.

• The number of new residents entering the game has slowed down.

• Business people are complaining in world about a lack of sales, meaning those are going down at the moment. There is for example being rumored that 70% of the Plush sims are unused right now.

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The official Second Life blog has today an entry about so called megaprims (greater than 10m at one side at least). Megaprims where never intended to be, but they happened some while ago and they are in use in different buildings, you can either get them just so or buy them at stores.

They are rumored to have a negative impact on the physics engine and to cause lags and such, but none the less many builders have adopted them very fast and used them in their buildings.

So there’s a discussion about it they should stay or not; at the moment they are only tolerated by Lindenlab, but they don’t really like them.

So what’s the sensible approach? Are they needed or not? I guess they are needed, because they fit into a gap. I mean, why would you use for example 9 prims (10x10m) to make a floor that’s 30x30m wide when you just can use one prim? Because they are needed, they’ve been used and there’s a market around it.

The statistical mark of 10 million residents in Second Life has been reached today. No big fanfare nor press message at all, this shows the shift from promoting Second Life to promoting the grid. Heck, the number of residents isn’t even been shown on the first page of the website anymore for quite some weeks.

All the big databases of Second Life are using MySQL. Lindenlab runs them on the premise: databases are ordinary, better run 50 of them than just to have a big one. Choosing and running a database engine is one thing, the other how you install it.

A big matter of choice and on the impact on the whole data system is of course the operating system - Lindenlab runs Linux - and of the underlying file system. According to the SL history wiki all the database servers of Lindenlabs use ext3 as default filesystem, after they uses ReiserFS 3 for a while and evaluated XFS. Ext3 is really a bad choice if you need the best performance your hardware can give.

Well, why that? There are some reasons. There’s this interesting IRC log of MySQL employee Kristian Köhntopp. Köhntopp is quite well known for his articles about computer topics and such. This IRC log is about which file system you should choose for a database server in general, but you can take his views of course too on the databases empowering Second Life.

• There is now a blog from Charity Colville in which she tells her side of the story about “The rise and fall of Phat Cat’s”. The events around Phat Cat’s have been going on for quite some time now, I still wonder that they haven’t come to an end, yet. In the end it’s a story you cannot find out on your own, if it’s right or wrong, so it’s about whom you believe more.

• Metaversed has been running an article about a LL-function that has been disabled by the Lindens without notice and has broken many seats and other sitting furnitures. Ouch. It has been undocumented, but widely used all the time, the Lindens considered it a hack instead. And, oh well, one of the residents even got wind before it happened weeks ago and told them that it’s a bad idea at all. No reaction. Bummer.

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You can read this on the blog of Second Life now:

Linden Research, Inc., Philip Rosedale, and Marc Bragg have agreed to settle the “Bragg v. Linden and Rosedale” lawsuit currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The parties agree that there were unfortunate disagreements and miscommunications regarding the conduct and behavior by both sides and are pleased to report that Mr. Bragg’s “Marc Woebegone” account, privileges and responsibilities to the Second Life community have been restored. For the benefit of the Second Life community, the Parties have mutually agreed that the terms of their resolution shall remain confidential. The Parties ask that this confidentiality be respected.

So this is lawyer speak. What does that mean in real speak? Something like this from Lindenlabs point of view: we would have lost the case! So better agree to restore Braggs’ account and properties in world and see if this is enough for him to drop the case before our roof really starts to burn and we’re losing big money!